Tourism businesses are increasingly improving their environmental and social practices through sustainability standards, certification, ESG reporting and shared-value strategies. These developments matter, but better performance within individual enterprises does not automatically add up to a healthier destination. Regenerative tourism therefore asks a wider question: how can tourism strengthen the ecological processes, community capabilities and relationships that allow an entire place to remain resilient and alive?
Over the past two decades, tourism has transformed places such as Hội An from relatively quiet cultural landscapes into globally recognised destinations. This transformation has brought undeniable economic benefits. It has also quietly reshaped something deeper: the relationship between people, place and the systems that sustain both.
Behind the growth curves lies a gradual erosion of some of the very qualities that made these destinations valuable in the first place. Natural ecosystems come under increasing pressure as waste accumulates, water systems are strained and land use intensifies. Cultural life shifts as some traditions become performances and everyday rhythms are reorganised around visitor flows. Local communities, long-term stewards of place, may find themselves repositioned as service providers within an economy they do not fully shape or control.
When “green tourism” is understood too narrowly
In response, the tourism industry has increasingly embraced the language of sustainability. “Eco-tours,” “green travel” and “sustainable tourism” now appear across marketing materials, destination strategies and business operations. These developments are important, but the terms are often used interchangeably, even though they do not always describe the same depth or scale of change.
In common usage, green tourism is frequently associated with environmentally preferable products, nature-based experiences and resource-saving practices. Academic reviews similarly note that the term is often used primarily in relation to tourism’s environmental impacts, while sustainable tourism has a broader economic, social and cultural scope (Streimikiene et al., 2021).
This narrower understanding should not be confused with the formal principles of sustainable tourism. The definition developed by UNEP and UN Tourism considers the present and future economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism, together with the needs of visitors, the industry, host communities and the environment. It also emphasises the need for collaborative structures and coordinated strategies at both national and local levels (UNEP and UNWTO, 2005).
The problem, therefore, is not that sustainable tourism is conceptually inadequate. It is that its full meaning is often reduced during implementation. A multidimensional destination challenge becomes a checklist of environmental actions. A long-term process of stewardship becomes a commercial product. A question about how a place should develop becomes a question about how individual businesses can operate more efficiently.
Recent guidance from UN Tourism makes this distinction explicit. It presents regenerative tourism as a deepening of sustainable tourism rather than a replacement for it: an approach that brings greater attention to restoration, renewal and the interdependence of ecosystems, cultures, communities and local economies (UN Tourism, 2026).
The more useful question, then, is not whether green, sustainable or regenerative tourism is the “better” label. It is whether the practices behind those labels are changing the relationships and conditions that determine the future of a place.
Better business practices do not automatically create a healthier destination
Many tourism businesses are making serious efforts to improve their operations. Hotels and tour operators are adopting sustainability management systems, reducing energy and water use, changing procurement practices, improving working conditions and monitoring their environmental and social impacts.
Frameworks for Environmental, Social and Governance performance—ESG—are encouraging businesses to measure and disclose a wider range of impacts. The Global Reporting Initiative, for example, provides standards through which organisations can report their effects on the economy, environment and people in a more comparable and credible way (GRI, n.d.). UN Tourism is also developing a common ESG framework to support more consistent measurement and reporting across tourism businesses (UN Tourism, 2024).
Strategic approaches such as Creating Shared Value have further encouraged businesses to connect their competitiveness with improvements in the social and economic conditions of the communities around them (Porter and Kramer, 2011). Meanwhile, certification schemes and standards such as those aligned with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council help translate broad sustainability principles into practical requirements for hotels, tour operators and other tourism enterprises.
These frameworks are valuable. They make expectations more explicit, encourage accountability and provide businesses with a pathway for continuous improvement. But they largely begin with the organisation as the unit of action: its operations, employees, suppliers, customers, properties and value chain.
A business can improve what it controls. A destination, however, depends on many systems that no single business controls.
A hotel may reduce its water consumption while the wider watershed continues to deteriorate. A restaurant may separate its waste correctly while no reliable local infrastructure exists to recover the materials. A tour operator may purchase more products from local suppliers while agricultural land, local knowledge and village livelihoods continue to decline. Each business may be performing better, yet the destination as a whole may still be losing resilience.
The architecture of the GSTC standards recognises this difference. Its standards for hotels and tour operators address enterprise-level management, while the GSTC Destination Criteria apply to an identifiable place. At destination level, the requirements include coordinated management, public- and private-sector participation, stakeholder engagement, management of pressures and change, local economic benefits, cultural heritage, ecosystems, resources and waste (GSTC, 2019; GSTC, 2024).
This is more than a technical distinction between two sets of standards. It points to two different units of change.
Enterprise-level frameworks ask: How responsibly does this organisation operate?
A destination-level perspective must also ask: Are the combined activities of tourism making the place itself healthier, more equitable and more capable of adapting over time?
The first question is necessary. It cannot, by itself, answer the second.
When green actions leave the wider system unchanged
This difference helps explain why many well-intended tourism initiatives produce limited change beyond their immediate boundaries.
A tour that takes visitors into nature may respond to a genuine desire to travel more responsibly, but it does not necessarily contribute to the regeneration of that ecosystem. A hospitality business may replace plastic items with paper alternatives while leaving the underlying culture of single use and disposal untouched. Tree-planting initiatives may be disconnected from ecological conditions, land tenure, long-term stewardship and community ownership.
The limitation is not necessarily a lack of good intention. Nor is it always a failure of the individual activity. The deeper limitation is the absence of a system capable of connecting that activity to wider and longer-term change.
Waste, for example, is not simply a disposal problem. It is the outcome of how materials are designed, purchased, distributed, consumed, collected and recovered. At a deeper level, it reflects the relationships people have with materials, convenience, consumption and value.
Similarly, ecosystem degradation is not simply the absence of trees. It is the breakdown of relationships among soil, water, biodiversity, land use and human activity. Tourism need not be inherently extractive, but it becomes extractive when the value it generates is not reinvested in the ecological and social systems on which it depends.
Individual green actions may reduce pressure at particular points. Systemic change requires those actions to become part of a coordinated pathway: supported by appropriate infrastructure, clear roles, local capabilities, financing mechanisms, shared evidence and long-term stewardship.
From minimising harm to regenerating place
This is where regenerative development offers a different lens. Rather than asking only how to minimise harm, it asks how development can strengthen the capacity of living systems to restore, renew and evolve.
Regenerative development begins with an understanding of place—not simply as a physical location, but as a living pattern of ecological processes, human relationships, knowledge, culture and economic activity. Its purpose is not only to improve individual components, but to develop the capability of people and institutions to care for the whole system over time (Mang and Reed, 2012).
From this perspective, success is not measured by reduced impact alone. It also depends on whether a place becomes more resilient, more alive and more capable of sustaining itself because the relationships and capacities within that place have been strengthened.
Applying this perspective to tourism requires a shift from designing experiences alone to designing relationships. It means seeing a destination not as a collection of attractions and tourism businesses, but as a living system composed of ecological processes, cultural practices, economic flows and social relationships.
Within such a system, tourism becomes one actor among many. Its role is not simply to generate revenue or to make its own operations less harmful. It can also help create demand for local products, finance stewardship, support locally held knowledge, connect visitors with real transition processes and strengthen the capabilities needed to care for the destination.
The regenerative value of tourism must therefore be assessed through what changes in the place—not simply through how an experience is described.
The missing capacity between stakeholders
Translating this thinking into practice is not straightforward. One of the central challenges is the fragmentation of stakeholders. Governments, businesses, communities and technical organisations often operate in parallel rather than in coordination. Each may address one part of the problem, but without alignment, their efforts rarely add up to systemic change.
This gap points to the need for intermediary structures: organisations, partnerships or platforms capable of connecting actors, translating between different forms of knowledge and coordinating action across sectors and scales.
Intermediaries do not replace governments, businesses or communities. They help these actors function as part of a more coherent system. They connect scientific understanding with lived local knowledge, economic incentives with ecological realities, policy frameworks with everyday practice, and short-term projects with the long-term work of operating and maintaining change.
This role is already implicit in international sustainable tourism guidance. UNEP and UN Tourism emphasise that progress depends on collaborative structures and coordinated strategies, particularly because tourism is fragmented across many enterprises, public agencies, communities and sectors (UNEP and UNWTO, 2005). The GSTC Destination Criteria similarly require an effective coordinating structure involving both public and private actors rather than placing responsibility in a single organisation (GSTC, 2019).
In Hội An and its surrounding rural landscapes, including Gò Nổi, this intermediary role is particularly important. Tourism, agricultural livelihoods, floodplain ecosystems, material flows, cultural heritage and community life continuously interact. Addressing one domain without understanding its relationship with the others may simply shift a problem from one part of the system to another.
What community-led regenerative systems can look like
What is beginning to emerge in such places is a model of community-led regenerative systems. In these systems, local communities are not positioned simply as beneficiaries of development, but as co-designers, operators and long-term stewards.
Community-led does not mean that communities must carry the work alone. It means that local actors retain meaningful agency while working with governments, businesses, researchers, technical organisations and other partners able to contribute knowledge, resources, infrastructure and institutional support.
Environmental interventions are grounded in place-specific knowledge and supported by technologies and operating systems that can be maintained locally. Economic value is generated not only through visitor spending, but through activities that strengthen local livelihoods, ecological stewardship and the community’s ability to respond to change.
Tourism, in this model, becomes a channel for participation, learning, contribution and long-term relationships rather than consumption alone. Its value lies not merely in bringing visitors to a project or village, but in bringing appropriate demand, revenue, knowledge exchange and partnerships into systems that local actors are already building and operating.
The work being developed across the Green Youth Collective ecosystem can be understood within this broader shift. Rather than creating standalone green products, the ecosystem is building connections among waste prevention and resource recovery, closed-loop farming, agroecological and floodplain restoration, community learning and regenerative tourism.
These systems are still evolving and continue to face real challenges of operation, governance, coordination and long-term financial viability. Yet they provide a practical testing ground for a more integrated model of local development—one in which tourism enters an existing process of place-based regeneration rather than turning regeneration into another tourism product.
Tourism as a participant in a living system
The significance of these efforts lies not primarily in their novelty, but in their direction. They suggest that the future of tourism will not be defined only by how efficiently individual businesses can reduce their impacts or generate value from a destination. It will also depend on whether tourism can contribute to the collective capacity of that destination to care for its land, resources, heritage and people.
Standards, certification and ESG reporting remain essential. They help businesses establish credible baselines, improve performance and become accountable for what lies within their influence. But destination health requires another layer of work: coordination, shared infrastructure, local institutions, intermediary capacity and relationships that continue beyond the boundaries of any single enterprise.
For destinations such as Hội An, the stakes are clear. The qualities that attract visitors cannot be sustained through incremental business improvements alone. Their future requires a deeper rethinking of how tourism is embedded within the ecological and social systems that sustain the destination.
In that sense, the most important shift may ultimately be conceptual: from seeing tourism only as an industry operating in a place to understanding it as a participant in a living system.
Once that shift is made, the guiding question is no longer only:
“How can each tourism business reduce its impact?”
It becomes:
“How can tourism strengthen the ecological functions, community capabilities and relationships that keep this place alive?”
References
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (n.d.) GRI Standards. Available at: https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/(Accessed: 12 August 2026).
Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) (2019) GSTC Destination Criteria, Version 2.0. Washington, DC: Global Sustainable Tourism Council. Available at: GSTC Destination Criteria.
Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) (2024) Terms of Reference for the Revision of the GSTC Industry Criteria for Hotels and Tour Operators. Washington, DC: Global Sustainable Tourism Council. Available at: GSTC Industry Criteria Revision.
Mang, P. and Reed, B. (2012) ‘Regenerative Development and Design’, in Meyers, R.A. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology. New York: Springer, pp. 8855–8879. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0851-3_303.
Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2011) ‘Creating Shared Value’, Harvard Business Review, January–February. Available at: https://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value.
Streimikiene, D., Svagzdiene, B., Jasinskas, E. and Simanavicius, A. (2021) ‘Sustainable tourism development and competitiveness: The systematic literature review’, Sustainable Development, 29(1), pp. 259–271. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2133.
United Nations Environment Programme and World Tourism Organization (UNEP and UNWTO) (2005) Making Tourism More Sustainable: A Guide for Policy Makers. Paris and Madrid: UNEP and UNWTO. Available at: UNEP publication page.
UN Tourism (2024) ‘UN Tourism and World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance to Advance Common ESG Framework’. Available at: UN Tourism.
UN Tourism (2026) Regenerative Tourism: Discussion Paper. Committee on Tourism and Sustainability, CTS/23/DOC/IV. Madrid: UN Tourism. Available at: UN Tourism Regenerative Tourism Discussion Paper.